Examining the role of Indian dance & dancers in Air India’s 'Safety Mudras'
In Air India’s recently released safety video 'Safety Mudras', dancers take on the roles of air stewardesses and perform the most memorable in-flight safety briefing yet. When a passenger opens the plane’s safety instruction booklet in the video, she accesses a portal to an India symbolised by temples, courts, beaches, forests and fields and stewarded by classical and folk dancers. Against these lush landscapes, fully decked-out dancers representing different dance forms and their regions of origin mime safety instructions with safety belts, life vests, and oxygen masks, flexibly incorporating the safety agenda into the idiom of Indian dance—or so it appears.
I came across this video via a WhatsApp group for odissi dancers in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place I had moved to not too long ago. For those who love and practise these art forms, the existence of such a high-profile feature of Indian dance is worth celebrating. But beyond the spectacular display of dedication and virtuosity that we all recognise, what exactly do dance and dancers signify to the world in these representations? I’d like to take a closer look at the way Air India’s safety video places dance/rs within the global tourist economy to create a curated picture of Indian dance and a kind of capitalist advancement inflected by tradition.
Stewards of comfort/stewards of culture
The video opens in the plane cabin, with an air stewardess instructing a young passenger to open her safety booklet. In the fantasy universe opened within, dancers carry on her role of providing instructions through movements inspired by the classical storytelling language of abhinaya. Substituting the stewardess and dancer highlights unexpected similarities between the two icons, professions, and forms of work: today, a dancer is a type of worker and a stewardess a type of performer: smiling to erase evidence of their effort, both aim to satisfy their customers. This is a refreshing perspective because it realistically represents the way we produce and consume art under capitalism, defying deep-rooted romantic myths that art transcends the world and its economic structures. Clearly, in the video, Indian classical and folk dancers are not only working toward lofty artistic goals; they are working—hard—for the global tourism industry.
But 'Safety Mudras' tries to have its cake and eat it too. While its gambit relies on viewers being able to recognise that Indian dancers are customer service providers, the video otherwise tries to disguise this fact so that dance can continue to serve a fantasy of being ancient, authentic, and classically Indian. One way it does this is by featuring dancers in temples and courts, rainforests, floral fields, and even on the beach (stepping in water)—places coded as simultaneously ancient and timeless and certainly outside commercial relationships.
What this kind of portrayal does is once again align non-western women with nature, pre-modernity, and the exotic faraway, unapologetically turning age-old orientalism into self-orientalism. Furthermore, it follows airline companies’ tried-and-tested strategy of marketing native women themselves as travel destinations, capitalising on multiple flavours of desire to lubricate the flow of capital. There are many layers of irony here given that classical dance has always existed within 'the competitive market and the modern secular stage' (contrary to the caption statement, there is no 'bharatanatyam' that existed in temples of Tamil Nadu), and that you will likely find classical dancers in the destination you are flying from as well as the India in which you land.1
Using dancers’ bodies as vehicles to carry nation and culture is nothing new, especially within the global tourism industry in which difference is capital and we have tickets to sell. But from a dancer’s point of view, I question: how long must this stereotypical portrayal of Indian dance continue, when it is so at odds with these dances’ history and the practices that sustain them today? When dance is retrospectively inscribed into the temple over the classroom or stage, when its proper and authentic place is a timeless India and not a living global network, and its participants are homogeneously fair-skinned South Asian women, a tightly controlled fantasy of all that Indian dance is gets cemented again and again. And what for?
India, filtered through Dance
Recently, safety videos have shouldered the immense task of providing a whirlwind tour through all a destination has to offer a prospective tourist. How can a country’s diversity and richness be squeezed into the time it takes to say “Please locate the nearest emergency exit?” While British Airways chose to attract tourists by hinging on the global reputation of its entertainment figures and Singapore Airlines adapted different parts of the safety briefing to various tourist spots, Air India presented eight dance forms as a way to curate the nation’s diversity.
It is well-known that the “Classical” dances of India are modern reconstructions of older practices that the British had outlawed during the colonial period. This process involved removing elements of sexuality which had tainted them as salacious while emphasising their devotional character. This was not any devotion; rather, through its themes, movement metaphors, texts used, and curation, Indian dance clearly stood for the “sanskritized Hindu spirit of India’s past. 2
Bearing in mind the Hindu coding of at least classical dance, the fact that 'Safety Mudras' introduces us to India via classical then folk forms already filters the nation through the subtle lens of Hinduism as the common heritage from which art and culture springs. This allows the video to assert India’s diversity while bypassing sensitive categories of religion, ethnicity, caste, and language. When mobilised like this to reflect a shared cultural heritage, Indian dance creates a seemingly apolitical and unifying veneer, even though/just as its usage is complicit with Hindu nationalism. And in its reflection shines an idealised form of capitalism rooted in a nationalised tradition.
Capitalism: rooted in tradition, reflected in dance
Finally, I would like to comment on the video’s aesthetics, on which a large part of the video’s message rests. By modifying the storytelling language of abhinaya to serve the safety briefing, dancers in the video create an aesthetic that places itself both within and beyond classical dance. 'Safety Mudras' portrays Air India’s need to convey safety instructions to passengers as the raison d'être of this aesthetic development, which parallels the real-life situation in which the 'challenge of...keep[ing] passengers engaged, embody[ing] Indian culture, and enhanc[ing] the global presence of Air India; inspired the video’s concept.3
As it is capital which develops these “ancient” dance forms in and outside of the video, capitalism is affirmed as generative: it pushes dance forward according to the video’s logic, by which dance represents a golden heritage and capitalism the present and future. However, that Indian dance and dancers are shown as capable of matching the airline’s agenda also affirms them as flexible—a cherished value of neoliberalism.4 This double affirmation is how nationalism and neoliberal capitalism shake each other’s hands, and in so doing boost each other’s repute and goals in 'Safety Mudras'.
If this argument rests on the aesthetic synthesis, then its quality is of utmost importance. From its title, 'Safety Mudras' already promises to combine classical dance abhinaya—consisting of expressions and mudras, or gestures—with the agenda of the in-flight safety video. It delivers on this promise on certain fronts, for example in the sections where the bharatanatyam and odissi dancer stylistically model acts of stowing baggage in overhead compartments and closing tray tables. In doing so, they reconfigure mudras which typically serve to tell stories of gods and goddesses in classical repertoires for storytelling agendas that were not established or necessarily anticipated for abhinaya—following the lead of artists worldwide working in and with Indian classical dance today.
However, even so, I argue that the commitment to actually letting dancers 'tell the story' here is half-hearted. The dancers’ iconic visual appearance, which blends in with the natural and cultural mise-en-scène, is enough to satisfy the viewer’s appetite for exoticism. This obscures the fact that most of their gestures only punctuate the safety briefing, rather than demonstrate it. In many instances, there is little to no relation between what dancers do on screen and the substance of the briefing, for example in the bihu section, where a circular icon in the corner of the screen shows life vests stowed in the plane’s armrests while in the mainframe, bihu dancers turn jovially against the blue sky (3:02-3:08). At other times, dancers are used as decorative frames for instructions rendered in the form of digital graphics, such as in the Kathakali section. Here the dancer stretches out his hands in front of his chest making space between them for another circular icon on which the actual briefing commences. Save for the up-down movement of his eyebrows, the kathakali dancer is static as information is conveyed on the overlaid graphic.
While the choice to interface dancers and safety objects is a self-conscious form of juxtaposition—one that is effective as it is humorous—I read this lack of integration between the materials of 'the briefing' and 'the dance' as friction which reveals a yet un-bridged gulf between Indian dance and the mission for which it was recruited. I believe that Safety Mudras could not meaningfully digest, incorporate and re-present Indian dance in its own representational language, yet. Instead, the video primarily re-hashed Indian dance in a spectacular fashion that follows conventions of cultural tourism and orientalist media. Granted, maybe this is all we can expect this from an advertisement? What do you think?
'Safety Mudras' is without a doubt a massive feat—creative, entertaining and exuberant, it has clearly cultivated fascination and instilled pride in viewers around the world. While enjoying and being amused by the video, I also wished to analyse further what it contributed torepresentations of Indian dance and dancers today. To that end, I can only hope this brief article provoked some thought for those inside, outside, and around dance alike.
Blbiography (in order of citation):
1. Chakravorty, P. (2000). 'From interculturalism to historicism: Reflections on classical indian
dance'. Dance Research Journal, 32(2), 108. https://doi.org/10.2307/1477983.
2. Velani, B. (2024, February 23). 'Air India new inflight safety video celebrates Indian music and dance forms'. Aviation A2Z. https://aviationa2z.com/index.php/2024/02/23/air-india-new- inflight-safety-video-celebrates-indian-music-dance-forms/?no_cache=1708702021
3. Kedhar, A. (2020). Flexible bodies: British South Asian dancers in an age of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Leia is a writer, composer and Odissi learner from Singapore. A new resident of the Bay Area, Leia is now a PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley where she works on queer performance, the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and Indian classical dance.
